Today was an exciting morning for IT Professionals attending TechEd 2013 North America as details around changes benefiting Windows Azure IaaS were made public today. Now, more than ever, would be a great time for any organization to take advantage of what Azure has to offer.

Windows Server 2012 R2 will be available after preview (also to be added to Virtual Machines Image Gallery, as a pre-built image).

SQL Server AlwaysOn to be made generally available later this year for Virtual Machines.

Even though Microsoft billing approach for Windows Azure has now changed, quality of service will not differ. Organizations who begin to or continually utilize Windows Azure will continue to receive highly available services with monthly SLAs, along with the scale, support and reliability of Microsoft's cloud platform.

You can get the official announcements from Scott Guthrie's blog post here.